Despite all available technology and despite major disruptions that the internet brought about in many sectors of modern life, scholarly communication has only seen change at glacial pace. Many useful, laudable tools and services are being developed to solve specific issues for particular domain groups. However, the question of how these efforts fit together remains largely unaddressed. If we have alternative models for all parts of the system, will that result in a coherent system? Will it be interoperable? Will it appeal to people as viable alternative? Will it be open and participatory for all?The solution we propose is that of a scholarly commons: a set of principles and rules for the community of researchers and other stakeholders to ascribe to, the practices based on those principles, and the common pool of resources around which the principles and practices revolve. The tenets of the scholarly commons are that research and knowledge should be freely available to all who wish to use or reuse it (open, FAIR and citable), participation in the production and use of knowledge should be open to all who wish to participate, and there should be no systemic barriers and disincentives to prevent either such free use or open participation.In this paper, we outline the backgrounds of the idea of the scholarly commons and the various considerations that play a role in defining it. We share the principles of the scholarly commons and the degrees of freedom interpreting those principles, and consider the broader landscape of ideas and charters that the scholarly commons fits into. Finally, we present a call for action to involve like-minded people in the discussion on how to bring such a commons to fruition, and what this would mean for different communities within science and scholarship.

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Increasing attention is being paid to the operation of biomedical data repositories in light of efforts to improve how scientific data is handled and made available for the long term. Multiple groups have produced recommendations for functions that biomedical repositories should support, with many using requirements of the FAIR data principles as guidelines. However, FAIR is but one set of principles that has arisen out of the open science community. They are joined by principles governing open science, data citation and trustworthiness, all of which are important aspects for biomedical data repositories to support. Together, these define a framework for data repositories that we call OFCT: Open, FAIR, Citable and Trustworthy. Here we developed an instrument using the open source PolicyModels toolkit that attempts to operationalize key aspects of OFCT principles and piloted the instrument by evaluating eight biomedical community repositories listed by the NIDDK Information Network (dkNET.org). Repositories included both specialist repositories that focused on a particular data type or domain, in this case diabetes and metabolomics, and generalist repositories that accept all data types and domains. The goal of this work was both to obtain a sense of how much the design of current biomedical data repositories align with these principles and to augment the dkNET listing with additional information that may be important to investigators trying to choose a repository, e.g., does the repository fully support data citation? The evaluation was performed from March to November 2020 through inspection of documentation and interaction with the sites by the authors. Overall, although there was little explicit acknowledgement of any of the OFCT principles in our sample, the majority of repositories provided at least some support for their tenets.

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